Targeting Singapore’s property market, Chinese developers leave a trail of unease

With bids that vastly outpace their local competitors, firms from mainland China are grabbing some of the top properties in the Lion City, raising fears of market-wide price inflation

Reading Time:4 minutes

Private residential apartments and public housing estates in Singapore. Increasingly, Chinese firms are outbidding local firms for new property projects in the Lion City. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:30am, 6 Aug 2017Updated: 12:35pm, 6 Aug 2017

For more than a decade, a plot of land roughly the size of three football fields sat empty at the heart of Singapore’s oldest public housing estates.

As property developers snatched up parcel after parcel in the Queenstown estate, named after Queen Elizabeth II, the plot of empty land that sat beside Stirling Road remained untouched. Until April this year.

On April 10, the Singapore government said it had received an application by a property developer to launch the site for tender, with the developer promising to pay no less than S$685.25 million (HK$4 billion).

A month after the tender was launched, 13 bids were lodged for the 99-year lease on the plot of land. The lowest bid was S$713.8 million, S$30 million above the reserve price. The highest and winning bid was a record S$1.002 billion, lodged by a consortium of two Chinese developers, Logan Property and the Nanshan Group.

The winning bid by Logan, which is listed in Hong Kong, was higher than the second bid made by Hong Kong’s MCL Land by 8.3 per cent.

The stunning coup comes on the back of a foreign invasion of the Singapore property market, led by the mainland Chinese. Out of eight land sites released by the Singapore government so far this year, three were won by Chinese developers who put in bids that far outstripped what local rivals were prepared to pay.